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“We understand the ordinary business of living, we know how to work the machine,” T.S. Eliot wrote in 1939’s “The Family Reunion.” “We are insured against fire, against larceny and illness, against defective plumbing, but not against the act of God.” Eliot’s play was a disaster, but it well illustrates the binaries written right into the name of pioneering industrial band Godflesh. Since the duo’s formation in 1988, their artistic underpinnings have encompassed human screams and assembly-line roars, hot blood and cold steel, the devil we know and the android we fear.

Multi-instrumentalist Justin Broadrick and bassist G.C. Green weren’t the first in heavy music to exploit these binaries through unbridled aggression; Killing Joke, Throbbing Gristle, and Einstürzende Neubauten are but three iconic groups that were active long before Godflesh. But in matters of sheer sonic magnitude, Godflesh’s juncture of man-made instrumentation (searing shouts, buzzsaw riffs) and artificial fury (militant drum loops, chrome-laden effects) was unprecedented upon arrival.

Three decades, six albums, and one 13-year hiatus later, Godflesh remain revered—and what’s more, they keep getting better. Post Self, the duo’s eighth LP and third release since reconvening in 2014, is easily the group’s best effort in over 20 years, not to mention 2017’s best industrial-metal album. Whereas the preceding A World Lit Only By Fire functioned primarily as a reintroduction to Godflesh’s primordial rage, Post Self represents a sinister amalgam of its creators’ greater body of work, especially Broadrick’s ambient project Jesu.

Broadrick and Green have tinkered with the scale of their musical modi operandi over the years, but they’ve kept their building blocks consistent. Broadrick’s drum machines and Green’s gnarled, rubbery bass riffs supply the music’s driving engine as well as its primary source of order, a rhythmic buffer against Broadrick’s animalistic grunts. Godflesh’s factory-floor soundscapes prove hostile and inhuman. “Be God” and “No Body” find Broadrick playing Iron Man’s murderous cousin, his full-throated bark distorted beyond recognition. “In Your Shadow” takes the mechanical suffocation even further, with vocals so compressed and static-ridden, you can’t help but wonder if the man moonlights as a Dalek.

Post Self’s violent detachment from the world of the living are certainly attention-grabbing, and on songs like “Parasite” and the title track, even ear-pleasing. But the disturbing ghosts haunting Godflesh’s machine aren’t as simple, or as static, as they seem. “Mirror of Finite Light” lights up the darkness with a shoegaze-y arc flash straight out of the Jesu playbook, awash in textured synths and hazy drone. “The Infinite End,” the LP’s closer, explores this liminality to majestic effect, condensing light and shadow down to a single, sublime point, like the Big Bang in reverse.

Brisk, 47-minute runtime aside, Post Self is a daunting listen, as well as an essential one, even by Godflesh’s sterling standards. Broadrick and Green’s brutal alchemy has never felt more prescient in our current age of backflipping robots and—if inventor Elon Musk’s predictions hold true—global wars sparked by AI. If we’re barrelling straight towards the point of singularity, we might as well go out with speakers blaring. And we’d be hard pressed to find better sonic guides than Godflesh, industrial-metal’s most trusted duo, to carry us to the inevitable end.